I’m Cody, one of the founders of WakaSaba. Traditional video conferencing platforms like Zoom assume that you’re right in front of your device. We created WakaSaba for “distance first” video conferencing and have built novel ways to interact with your room and control your device from afar:
- Hand Tracking: Turn your hands into a mouse and use it to point, select, and click. Supports basic room controls like muting / unmuting yourself and more advanced features like controlling a countdown timer that’s shown to everyone in the room
- Gesture Recognition: React to anything that happens with your hands. We capture certain hand gestures and broadcast them to everyone in a fun, engaging, and minimally(?) intrusive way
- Phone Pairing: Scan a QR code to turn your phone into a remote with access to additional controls and interactive features
Another core feature of our platform is that it’s all in the browser. We explicitly designed WakaSaba so that users wouldn’t need to download additional software or install any apps.
We originally built this for online fitness instructors, but recently have been thinking about what other industries and use cases might benefit from our technology. As a result, we’ve reoriented our landing page to focus less on “why” you might use our platform and more on “what” you can do with it. Now we want to get it in front of people to collect thoughts and general feedback.
Instructions if you want to try it out:
1) There’s a `Try a Free Room` button on our homepage
2) Clicking it will create a room that you can join / invite anyone to for 40 minutes, no email or sign up required
3) Before joining the room, there are some tutorial screens that go over our core feature set
Sorry in advance for any rough edges! We’ve deliberately prioritized getting this in front of people above all else :)
If you encounter any issues or have any questions / feedback I’m all ears! I should be around for the next couple hours.